Writing America into the Twenty-First Century
Writing America into the Twenty-First Century:
Essays on the American Novel
Edited by
Elizabeth Boyle and Anne-Marie Evans
Writing America into the Twenty-First Century: Essays on the American Novel,
Edited by Elizabeth Boyle and Anne-Marie Evans
This book first published 2010
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2010 by Elizabeth Boyle and Anne-Marie Evans and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-2133-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2133-9
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ..................................................................................... vii
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Elizabeth Boyle and Anne-Marie Evans
Part 1: Youth and Age
A Gendered Approach to Ageing in Contemporary American Fiction:
A Portrait of the Old Man in Philip Roth’s Everyman................................. 6
Alex Hobbs
Chasing After the Wind: The Adolescent Aporias of Jeffrey Eugenides .. 22
Rachael McLennan
Part II: War and Crime
Writing into the Twenty-First Century: Don DeLillo Terrorism
and The Names .......................................................................................... 40
Leonard Wilcox
The American “Other” in the Gulf War Novel: Writing Race
and National Identity in Christopher John Farley’s My Favourite War .... 56
Jenna Pitchford
“Listen to him, Mr. Take-Charge”: Gender Politics and Morality
in Carl Hiaasen’s Crime Novels ................................................................ 76
Alan Gibbs
Part III: Culture
“Feel like we been in a movie of the week!” The Politics of Television
in Pynchon’s Vineland............................................................................... 94
David Turton
vi
Table of Contents
Anthony Giardina as a Representative of the “Renaissance” of Italian
American Writing.................................................................................... 111
Francesca de Lucia
Part IV: Spaces and Patterns
“Justified in the World”: Spatial Values and Sensuous Geographies
in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road ............................................................ 124
Anthony Warde
Of Machine Gods and Technological Daemons: Divine Patterns
in Contemporary Fictions of Technology................................................ 138
Will Slocombe
Contributors............................................................................................. 155
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This volume makes use of standard U.K. spellings and punctuation.
While any value that the reader might derive from this volume must be
attributed to the contributors, any errors or omissions, including typing
and formatting errors in the final text, are wholly the responsibility of the
editors.
INTRODUCTION
ELIZABETH BOYLE AND ANNE-MARIE EVANS
Why read American fiction in the twenty-first century?
In 2010, ten years into the new millennium, the American novel is in
the midst of an exciting period of change. Changes at home, including
9/11 and the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and
changes abroad, including the ongoing involvement of the United States
government in overseas conflicts and the global threats of terrorism and
climate change, mean that the 21st century American novel has to respond
with ever-increasing flexibility to new and challenging circumstances in
its effort to record and reflect on American life. The aim of Writing
America Into the Twenty-first Century: Essays on the American Novel is to
explore American fiction at this crucial juncture in American history.
Broadly speaking, the twenty-first century is an exciting time for
American Studies. Barack Obama’s inauguration as the 44th President of
the United States on 20th January 2009 signalled, for many, a new hope
for America. Significantly, Obama resurrected the tradition, initiated by
John F. Kennedy in 1961 but sidestepped by most other presidents
including George W. Bush, of including poetry in the Inauguration Day
ceremony and chose Yale University Professor and poet Elizabeth
Alexander’s specially written ‘Praise Song for the Day.’ This positioning
of literary art on the political stage augers well for a sympathetic
relationship between culture and politics as the new century progresses.
Many of the essays in this collection acknowledge the impact of Obama on
contemporary fiction, and the way that this new era in American history is
affecting the country’s literary output.
When this collection was originally conceived, our plan was to
examine a range of American authors from around 1980 to the present day
in order to present a general analysis of the type of novels produced in the
United States over the last thirty years. We had no remit other than that the
literary works discussed must fall into this time-frame. To our surprise,
when we began to review essays, the overwhelming majority of
submissions we received discussed male authors. Where was the work on
2
Introduction
contemporary American women writers? Where were the articles on Toni
Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Siri Hustvedt and Joyce Carol Oates? It is
tempting to speculate on the reasons for this (perhaps the looming idea of
the Great White Male novelist has not quite loosened its grip on university
reading lists and national reviews, despite frequent and persistent calls for
change1) but we soon discovered we had work on a range of interesting
male writers, both literary heavyweights and relative newcomers. Pressed
by circumstance, we decided to divide our project rather crudely and offer
up a collection of essays on male American writers working on the cusp of
the twenty-first century, with a view to researching and preparing a similar
collection on female American writers in the near future. We think the
resulting collection is both exciting and illuminating.
What this volume offers, then, is an original collection of work that
aims to situate male authors’ writing within the particular historical
location either side of the year 2000. This is not a selection of essays about
masculinity (although some essays do address masculinity), nor does it
offer a comprehensive survey of male American authors. Instead, it
provides perspectives on a carefully chosen selection of thought-provoking
texts produced by men over the past thirty years. The collection’s strength
is in its willingness to examine well-known and recognised authors (Philip
Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo) alongside writers who have more
recently emerged into the critical field (Anthony Giardina, Daniel Suarez).
The earliest text discussed in the collection is DeLillo’s The Names,
published in 1982, and the most recent are Hiaasen’s Nature Girl (2006)
and Suarez’s Daemon (2006), with the remaining essays covering texts
from the years between.
The essays in this collection have been divided thematically. The first
section, ‘Youth and Age’ presents two analyses of ageing and identity. In
‘A Gendered Approach to Ageing in Contemporary American Fiction: A
Portrait of the Old Man in Philip Roth’s Everyman’ Alex Hobbs examines
Roth’s exploration of ageing in his fiction, focusing on the unnamed
protagonist of Everyman. Against the backdrop of a youth-obsessed
America, Roth’s text defies literary trends and conventions to present the
reader with an ageing protagonist, the universal figure reinforced by the
novel’s title. In ‘Chasing After the Wind: The Adolescent Aporias of
Jeffrey Eugenides’ Rachel McLennan considers constructions of adolescence,
sexuality and youth culture in Eugenides’ novels The Virgin Suicides and
Middlesex. By analysing narrative modes and the complex function of
gender in Eugenides’ work, McLennan demonstrates the importance of
contemporary ideologies of adolescence and youth in twenty-first century
writing.
Elizabeth Boyle and Anne-Marie Evans
3
The second part of the collection, ‘War and Crime’ moves away from
the first section’s focus on self and identity to examine the broader
concepts of nation, conflict and politics. Leonard Wilcox critiques
DeLillo’s analysis of terrorism as a contemporary phenomenon in ‘Don
DeLillo Terrorism and The Names’, exploring how an awareness of
terrorism has become synonymous with a sense of national identity in
America, and drawing crucial parallels with the real-life events of
September 11th, 2001. Jenna Pitchford’s essay, ‘The American “Other” in
the Gulf War Novel: Writing Race and National Identity in Christopher
John Farley’s My Favourite War’ interrogates concepts of the American
military through an analysis of African American author Farley’s Gulf
War novel, demonstrating how his text problematises ideas of a unified
American identity. Finally, Alan Gibbs ventures into the world of the
comic crime writing in ‘“Listen to him, Mr. Take-Charge”: Gender
Politics and Morality in Carl Hiaasen’s Crime Novels’. Gibbs highlights
how Hiassen’s writing and ‘cartoon realism’ subverts crime fictions
stereotypes and continually deconstructs perceptions of gender. This
section, therefore, seeks to address issues of ‘War and Crime’ on all levels:
national, political and personal.
Part Three focuses on texts that in some way engage with the idea of
‘Culture’. Each essay looks at this term from a different and clearly
defined theoretical position. For example, in ‘“Feel like we been in a
movie of the week!” The Politics of Television in Pynchon’s Vineland’,
David Turton explores the uses of television in Pynchon’s prose in terms
of cultural materialism and cultures of paranoia. By placing the media,
visibility and technology at the centre of a discussion of Vineland, Turton
situates his response to Pynchon firmly within twenty-first century culture.
Concluding this section, Francesca De Lucia interrogates another
perception of ‘Culture’ in her analysis of the work of Anthony Giardina.
Her article, ‘Anthony Giardina as a Representative of the “Renaissance” of
Italian American Writing’ places the writer within the context of other
Italian American writers of recent years, allowing de Lucia to explore this
new wave of examining modes of ethnic identity in contemporary
American writing.
The final section of the collection, ‘Spaces and Patterns’, offers two
very different analyses of two very different novels. Anthony Warde
considers concepts of mapping, space and journeys in ‘“Justified in the
World”: Spatial Values and Sensuous Geographies in Cormac McCarthy’s
The Road’. By tracing a relationship between linguistics and spatial
awareness in The Road (a film version of which was released in 2009,
making this analysis all the more timely for a collection exploring
4
Introduction
contemporary authorship), Warde is able to explore McCarthy’s engagement
with cartography in terms of morality and self-definition. The final essay
in the volume, Will Slocombe’s ‘Of Machine Gods and Technological
Daemons: Divine Patterns in Contemporary Fictions of Technology’ offers
a refreshing contrast to traditional understandings of space, technology and
patterns. Through an analysis of Daniel Suarez’s 2006 novel, Daemon,
Slocombe offers a study of patterns of thinking about technology that are
constructed in relation to religious paradigms. This examination of
technological power and divinity considers computer systems,
communication and intelligent design in this response to a very twentyfirst century novel.
Overall, then, each essay in this collection seeks to explore the
directions in which the American novel continues to evolve. Two writers
in this collection, McCarthy and Eugenides, have won the Pulitzer Prize
for Fiction in the last decade, and by examining texts from the 1980s up to
the present decade, these essays that follow in the next pages aim not only
to provide a critical perspective on some of the novel’s developments in
those crucial years leading up and into the twenty-first century, but also to
gesture towards the shape of things to come.
Notes
1
See, for example, Francine Prose, ‘Scent of a Woman’s Ink: Are Women Writers
Really Inferior?’ Harper's Magazine (June 1998), 61-70; and Elaine Showalter’s
new survey of American women’s writing, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women
Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (New York: Random House, 2010).
PART I
YOUTH AND AGE
A GENDERED APPROACH TO AGEING
IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION:
A PORTRAIT OF THE OLD MAN
IN PHILIP ROTH’S EVERYMAN
ALEX HOBBS
Certainly many western cultures favour youth over old age, yet this is
perhaps especially true of America. Since the fifties, the United States has
been a youth-centric nation, focussing on teenagers and pre-middle-aged
adults as a primary market for industries and an attentive audience for
cultural output, long before other nations recognised teenagers as a distinct
group. Indeed, America has always been a country that has rewarded
youth; after all, the American Dream is only attainable to those who have
the energy to go after it. Perhaps consequently, age remains one of the last
acceptable prejudices in American society. This was made abundantly
clear in the media coverage of the 2008 US Presidential election, where
much was made of the age difference between the two candidates, Barrack
Obama and John McCain, and their respective and resultant abilities to
cope with the responsibilities of office.
Gerontologists agree that in the West there is the same ingrained
prejudiced hierarchy towards age as there is with any other pair of
descriptive terms (able/disabled, white/black, etc); as Daniel J. Levinson
surmises: “[t]he connotations of youth are vitality, growth, mastery, the
heroic; whereas old age connotes vulnerability, withering, ending, the
brink of nothing”.1 Indeed, Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs note that this
ageism has only worsened in recent decades:
While negative attitudes toward old age have been in evidence for
centuries, they have rarely played the role that they do in contemporary
society. What is unique about the ageism of modernity is that it is
represented in numerous institutional practices that treat ‘agedness’ as a
proxy for poverty, neediness and proximity to death.2
Alex Hobbs
7
The social stigma attached to age has been consistently compounded by
negative portrayals in the media. In The Fountain of Age (1993), Betty
Friedan argues that age is almost universally represented as a decline: a
movement away from life towards death, rather than a significant part of
life itself. It is not simply the case that youth is favoured, rather, images of
old age are wilfully hidden. Friedan was not surprised to find age
underrepresented in television, film, magazines, and advertising, but was
confused by an unwillingness to use images of age when they alone were
appropriate. In her survey for such images, she discovered that advertisers
used models far outside the appropriate age demographic for products like
arthritis medicine, and that in celebrity interviews and profile pieces, often
the photograph accompanying the text was many years out of date.
Such evidence has led Peter Öberg to confirm that the “misery
perspective” of age is the most prevalent in society. Yet Öberg is hopeful
that “new images for older people in popular culture where they—
especially the young-old—are looking and dressing youthfully, having
sex, dieting, actively travelling, and so forth” are now emerging.3 As
Gilleard and Higgs confirm, “[r]esisting not just old age but ageing itself is
becoming an integral component of many adult lifestyles”.4 This, of
course, can have a negative impact; adults entering old age are under
pressure to conform to “an unspecified but pervasive lifestyle aesthetic”,
creating a new homogeneity of age based on youthful appearance and not
diversity.5 Rather than this rigidity, what most gerontologists try to
underline through their work is the many spectrums of age, and age that is
classified in a variety of ways. Sarah Munson Deats and Langretta Tallent
Lenker categorise several types of age, all of which may be applicable in
describing the age of an individual:
[C]hronological age (the numerical total of years lived), biological age (the
strength, health, vigor, and elasticity of the body, which frequently bear
little relationship to chronological age), social age (the culturally
constructed, often prescriptive behaviours arbitrarily linked to a
chronological numeral), and individual age (our own self-image, which is
often at variance with all the other markers of age).6
As in factual media, Anne M. Wyatt-Brown has recognised that
historically, older characters are not commonly the protagonists of fiction;
she states:
Our collective understanding is that Anglo-American literary criticism, like
the society from which it springs, until recently has been uncritically
ageist. For many years most novelists, poets, and playwrights have
8
A Gendered Approach to Ageing in Contemporary American Fiction
hesitated to make older characters the central protagonists for fear that
such works would not attract many readers.7
Yet as gerontology has grown as a field of study, Barbara Grey Waxman
has noted a parallel rise in fiction about old age and a comparable goal to
redress negative stereotypes. Waxman has termed this fiction
Reifungsromane, which she explains as “novel[s] of ripening – opposing
[…] central tenet[s] to the usual notion of deterioration in old age”.8
Waxman claims that there are more female authors writing
Reifungsromane—Sylvia B. Henneberg calls them “creative crones”9—
than men, and cites Simone de Beauvoir’s investigation into the dual
challenges of being an ageing women, and her hope for an ageless society
set out in The Coming of Age (1970) as an important catalyst for this
creative output. Waxman recognises that while age discrimination is
illegal, “socially the artificial divides between youth and age still exist,
with patriarchal culture assigning identity and social value to individuals
on the basis of age and elders being devalued” (8). Thus, it is her
contention that women are more affected by age than men and as a
corollary are more often driven to address it in fiction, which is proven by
the relative absence of male authored Reifungsromane against the
comparative wealth of examples created by women.
Through her study of female-authored Reifungsromane, which includes
such writers as Felicia Lord, Marcia Ivory, and Jane Somers, Waxman has
been able to generalise its characteristics:
While Reifungsromane do not paint a uniformly rosy picture of old age—
they include themes of physical and psychic pain; loneliness; alienation
from family and youthful society; self-doubt; feelings of uselessness; and
grief over the loss of friends, mental acuity, and physical energy—there is,
nevertheless, an opening up of life for many of these aging heroines as they
literally take to the open road in search of themselves and new roles in life.
(16)
Reifungsromane, then, are journeys that dispel stereotyped notions of
weakness in old age by presenting “newly self-knowledgeable, selfconfident, and independent” women (17). Henneberg recognises a similar
ownership of old age in Sarton’s poetry but rather than creating new
positive aspects to ageing, she shows how Sarton finds strength in what
most would consider negative effects of the ageing process; she states:
[Sarton] truly embraced her aging body, and her love affair with solitude,
another condition often associated with old age, is well known. Her ability
to accept and even claim many things we generally shun—dependence,
Alex Hobbs
9
passivity, solitude, even the wrinkles—as normal, useful, and beautiful is
certainly radical. It shows that old age is worth venturing into because it
clearly has something to teach that those who are younger do not know.
(par. 18)
In her poetry, Sarton suggests that in old age some physical limitation is
not only acceptable and natural but, if embraced, can be truly liberating; in
senescence, activity and involvement can be completely on the terms of
the individual.
Both Sarton’s approach and that apparent in Reifungsromane as
defined by Waxman, offer portrayals of age that reject depressing
stereotypes and deviate from negative typecasts, and therefore promote a
different archetype: the “Well Elder” character. Explained by Kirk Combe
and Kenneth Schmader in their consideration of Shakespeare’s older male
characters, this is someone of advanced years in “excellent health [with]
independence”.10 Diametrically opposed—and often the protagonist of
negative representations of age—is the “Frail Elder”, who is typified as
one suffering with “declining functional status and concerns and
inadequate care by other family members […] [and] a gradual, progressive
decline in memory, intellectual performance, and orientation”.11 These
critics recognise a “spectrum of aging at work” throughout Shakespeare’s
plays, identifying Prospero as a “Well Elder” and Lear as a “Frail Elder”.12
Thus, while negative representations of age may be more common in
male-authored literature, their analysis highlights a range of portrayals
available in the literary canon.
Popular thought—endorsed by some feminist critics—has presumed
that women have been more disadvantaged by age than men, as,
historically, their power has been rooted in their sexuality and appearance.
In contrast, there is, as Wyatt-Brown notes, a widely held “myth that men
are exempt from the influence of aging”.13 Chris Holmund reflects this
argument in his analysis of American film; he writes
[That] men are ‘permitted’ to age, i.e. to have long careers in film, is taken
for granted, dismissed as self-evident, with merely the occasional flip
comment offered regarding Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon’s repetitive
romps or Sylvester Stallone’s latest ‘come back’.14
However, this disparity in the way age is accepted for men and women
has disadvantages for men too. In a special issue of The Journal of Men’s
Studies dedicated to age, Edward H. Thompson Jr agrees that age is an
aspect of masculinity that is often ignored:
10
A Gendered Approach to Ageing in Contemporary American Fiction
To all intents and purposes, growing older seems to be outside
conceptualizations of masculinity. In most discourses one can be masculine
and one can be old, but not both […]. Normative masculinity became and
remains embodied by middle-age and younger men, both in the mass
culture and in men’s studies. The upshot is our pluralistic ignorance of
nearly 20 percent of the adult men in the nation.15
To overlook these men is to exclude them from the spectrum of masculine
identities and therefore suggest that, after a certain point in life,
masculinity diminishes with age. Öberg’s extensive research has shown
that men themselves accept this theory; he writes, “[t]he proportion of men
who think they look masculine decreases with each successive age group
[…]. There is no significant comparable change among women who
believe they look feminine”.16 Thus, like stereotyped formations of
femininity, masculinity is also perceived as situated in a physical realm. In
Reclaimed Powers (1987), David Gutmann avers:
In settings in which elders have the social leverage to arrange matters
according to their own priorities, we find striking evidence of new
development in both the male and female personalities in later life, the
emergence of new executive capabilities that go beyond mere adjustment
to imposed loss.17
He suggests that while in their active parenting years, adult men and
women are forced into stereotypical sex-roles, older adults, however, are
relatively free from these responsibilities and can become more
androgynous. He views this removal of strictly gendered identity as a
positive transformation, but it is this similar loss of a definitively gendered
role that Öberg isolates as cause for masculine anxiety in his research.
Furthermore, in addition to the importance of appearance, masculinity
is also linked to usefulness, i.e. the capacity to retain employment and
provide for the family. Consequently, retirement can be a serious wrench
for a man (something that is not necessarily reciprocated in women due to
more frequent career breaks for pregnancy, child care, etc.). Thus,
masculinity may be judged largely in physical terms—appearance and
activity—because there is no longer any masculine value assigned to
wisdom; as Öberg notes:
We who are approaching old age can hardly remember a time when older
people were respected, looked up to, venerated for their wisdom. We can’t
see ourselves in biblical images of prophets with white beards or in the
anthropological lore of times before literacy, before printing press, radio,
Alex Hobbs
11
television, computer, when the elders were the repositories of the
accumulated knowledge, wisdom, history, and traditions of the tribe.18
Conforming to social pressures, men hoping to retain a powerful image
must therefore indicate that their body is as competent as those of youthful
men around them.
While fiction concerned with old age seems to be more common for
women writers offering ageing female protagonists, there are examples of
old male characters written by men in American fiction, from canonical
writers like Ernest Hemingway (for example, The Old Man and the Sea
[1952]) to contemporary authors like Paul Auster (The Brooklyn Follies
[2005]) and Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men [2005]). While
many writers include one older male character within a characterscape of
others (in John Irving’s The Cider House Rules [1985], for example), it is
still quite unusual for a novel’s protagonist to be an old man.
Working against this convention, since the publication of Patrimony
(1991), almost every work by Roth has had an ageing or elderly central
character—with the notable exception of Indignation (2008)—as Roth
himself has remarked, “I don’t think anybody’s gotten out alive in my last
five books”.19 While his other novels look at how an aspect of the
protagonist’s life is affected by age—work in Exit Ghost (2007), sex in
Sabbath’s Theater (1995)—Everyman (2006) has no storyline as such,
only the consideration of the ageing process on the unnamed protagonist.
Indeed, by leaving his protagonist unnamed, such anonymity allows age
itself to become the main character of this text.
In the novel, the omniscient narrator reviews the life of the everyman
character, paying particular attention to his last years, and in doing so
addresses universal fears of ageing. The aspects of age that are identified
are wholly negative; catalogued are health problems, body changes,
depression, loss of friends and family members, and care-giving issues.
Although there are moments when the protagonist’s retirement has the
potential to become a Third Age in which he could experience creativity,
this is quickly negated by depression and fear. As Roth commented in an
interview with Mark Lawson, it is a novel of illness:
The narrative line […] follow[s] the history of a man’s illness. Therefore,
the moments when he’s well and healthy, I pass over in a paragraph. I
think I say, twenty-two years passed and he felt great. And I’m not
interested in that.20
From the outset, then, Roth is only interested in the “misery perspective”
and the “Frail Elder”.
12
A Gendered Approach to Ageing in Contemporary American Fiction
The protagonist has suffered illness throughout his life, but in old age,
his body is unable to recover from each successive blow. In his advanced
years, he becomes more aware of his body’s problems, as shown by the
minutely descriptive scenes of surgery, for one of which he remains
conscious:
[T]he operation lasted two hours and his head was claustrophobically
draped with a cloth and the cutting and scraping took place so close to his
ear, he could hear every move their instruments made as though he were
inside an echo chamber. But there was nothing to be done. No fight to put
up. You take it and endure it. Just give yourself over to it for as long as it
lasts.21
This sentiment represents the protagonist’s approach to the ageing process
as a whole: he has no control over where his body will take him and when
his life will end. The accounts of operations also show the lack of care
afforded the elderly; on separate occasions, he finds EKG pads and an IV
needle still affixed after he is released from hospital (74). This
helplessness and disregard that he experiences in old age is clearly pitted
against the attention he receives in hospital as a child, and the respect he
must have demanded as an advertising professional.
The continuation established with surgeries in both periods of his life,
points to what Friedan calls, “the unadulterated horror of second childhood,
a vision of ourselves regressing to a childlike state”.22 When the
recognition of being a vital adult is removed, all that remains is a childlike
existence; as Jeff Hearn has asserted, “beyond a certain point, the older the
man, the weaker he becomes not just physically and bodily, but also
socially”.23 To be treated as a child is the ultimate sign of this weakness,
but, as Friedan argues, the elderly are forced into this position by social
stigma not necessarily by their own frailty.
The protagonist is himself guilty of these perceptions of ageing. At
first he seems happy at Starfish Beach retirement village, describing his
new home in terms akin to a holiday resort. He sets out with good
intentions to keep his body and mind active:
As soon as he moved into the village, he turned the sunny living room of
his three-room condo into an artist’s studio, and now, after taking his daily
hour-long four-mile walk on the boardwalk, he spent most of the remainder
of each day fulfilling a long-standing ambition by happily painting, a
routine that yielded the excitement he’d expected. (64)
He decides to keep himself busy by running art classes in the village.
Though he is of a similar age to those he teaches, at first, he does not
Alex Hobbs
13
consider himself old like them. In his recognition of them as old, he
realises he relates to them as he might children:
He tried to link painting to play rather than to art by quoting Picasso to
them, something along the lines of their having to regain the child in order
to paint like a grownup. Mainly what he did was to replicate what he’d
heard as a kid when he started taking classes and his teachers were telling
him the same things. (83)
Soon, however, the protagonist appears to regress too. He begins by
retiring to the place he was happiest as a child, which is a place already
associated with death due to the stories he heard in his childhood of dead
bodies washing up along the shoreline. This, coupled with the hospital
visits in youth and old age, establishes a time-loop. However, instead of
the return to childhood signifying a rebirth, rather, it is an indicator that he
will soon have no life left. This is underlined by the repeated references to
time, such as his father’s watch and jewellery store, his interest in the
mechanics of watches, and the Hamilton watch that gets passed from
father to protagonist to daughter on death; as Roth says, there is “great
resonance in my having my hero play with these things”.24 Time is moving
forward but the old people in the village, including the protagonist, are
not. It is noted that “they spoke of how rapidly the months and the seasons
and the years went by, how life no longer moved at the same speed” (80),
but while time may pass, they do nothing with it.
Retirement villages that compartmentalise on the basis of advanced age
have been proven by gerontologists to be unhealthy and ultimately
damaging for those who are institutionalised. This was explored in
Disengagement Theory, propounded by Elaine Cumming and W.E. Henry
in the sixties, and reiterated by Friedan. While declined social activity may
previously have been considered normal, recent studies now stress the
importance of continuous social engagement. Levinson similarly identifies
a “primary developmental task of late adulthood is to find a new balance
of involvement with society and with the self”.25 He goes on to state that
“[i]f a man creates a new form of self-in-world, late adulthood can be a
season as full and rich as others”.26 This sociological scholarship is
reflected in the sentiment of Sarton’s poetry; although some renegotiation
of activeness may be necessary in age, she shows that senescence does not
demand a complete removal of activity and responsibility. Against this
positivity, as time moves on for the protagonist of Everyman, he is
stripped of these things that define his masculine identity.
Returning to Öberg’s hypothesis that men view their masculinity as
physicalised, it is in the protagonist’s sexual identity that he finds his self-
14
A Gendered Approach to Ageing in Contemporary American Fiction
belief in his masculinity most lacking. In his review of the novel, Stephen
Metcalf wrote that Roth’s focus on sex was unrealistic, that sex drive in a
character of this age was unconvincing: “[n]o doubt Roth’s own vanity, his
celebrity writer’s sense of seigniorial privilege, has led him to overassociate the horror of dying with the loss of sexual vitality”.27 However,
as sexual potency is such an integral facet of masculinity—both for men
personally and the social perception of men as a collective—the charge of
over-associating is unwarranted. Love/lust and death are often linked in
literature, and society more generally; in Death, Desire and Loss in
Western Culture (1998), Jonathan Dollimore contends, “[t]hat there are
connections between death and desire is a commonplace, but perplexing
one; after all, desire is on the side of life, life is opposed to death, therefore
desire also must be opposed to death”.28 He expands, arguing that “what
connects death with desire is mutability – the sense that all being is
governed by a ceaseless process of change inseparable from an
inconsolable sense of loss somehow always in excess of the loss of
anything in particular”.29 Echoing Dollimore’s critical analysis, Roth has
explored this pathos at length in the character of Mickey Sabbath, who not
only wards off his own mortality by reaffirming his sexual vitality but also
seeks to lose himself in these exploits as a means of avoiding grief over
the loved ones he has lost. Indeed, the sexual identity of older men is
something of a defining leitmotif for Roth’s later fiction, uniting the
unnamed protagonist, Mickey Sabbath, Coleman Silk in The Human Stain
(2000), Nathan Zuckerman in Exit Ghost, and David Kapesh in The Dying
Animal (2001).
Resisting the decline of virility has become increasingly important for
masculine identity in youth-obsessed American society. For this reason,
Viagra has been a very important development; as Öberg avers, “Viagra is
a way for men to perform important self-work, restoring a phenomenological
sense of the youthful, sexualized self”.30 While not chemically enhanced in
the novel—unlike Coleman Silk—the protagonist comes to appreciate
sexual promiscuity late in life; around the age of fifty, he embarks upon a
series of affairs with much younger women. These adventures, while
destroying his marriage, give him a renewed vigour. His soon to be exwife, Phoebe, explains this difference between men and women when she
says:
The man loses the passion for the marriage and he cannot live without. The
wife is pragmatic. The wife is realistic. Yes, the passion is gone, she’s
older and not what she was, but to her it’s enough to have the physical
affection, just being there with him in the bed, she holding him, he holding
her. The physical affection, the tenderness, the comradery, the closeness
Alex Hobbs
15
[…]. But he cannot accept that. Because he is a man who cannot live
without. (122)
Phoebe identifies the protagonist’s affairs as pursuits to find passion, but
perhaps they are also proof of his virility; these acts are a reaffirmation of
his masculinity at the point when society perceives it as diminishing, as
noted by Hearn.
Although the protagonist has a relatively late flush of sexual power, it
does not last; he meets a girl whilst walking along the beach and
considers:
Thirty years ago he wouldn’t have doubted the result of pursuing her,
young as she was, and the possibility of humiliating rejection would never
have occurred to him. But lost was the pleasure of the confidence, and with
it the engrossing playfulness of the exchange. He did his best to conceal his
anxiety—and the urge to touch—and the craving for just one such body—
and the futility of it all—and his insignificance—and apparently
succeeded. (133)
While the girl seems interested and takes his phone number, she does not
contact him, indeed, she changes her jogging route to avoid him. The
protagonist realises that he has lost this aspect of his masculinity; he may
be attracted to others but they are not attracted to him:
He neither possessed the productive man’s male allure nor was capable of
germinating the masculine joys, and he tried not to long for them too
much. On his own he had felt for a while that the missing component
would somehow return to make him inviolable once again and reaffirm his
mastery, that the entitlement mistakenly severed would be restored and he
could resume where he’d left off only a few years before. But now it
appeared that like any number of the elderly, he was becoming less and
less and would have seen his aimless days though to the end as no more
than what he was – the aimless days and the uncertain nights and the
impotently putting up with the physical deterioration and the terminal
sadness and the waiting and waiting for nothing. (160-1)
Like Mickey Sabbath, the protagonist equates life with being sexually
attractive to another, which includes the opportunity to be sexually active.
The protagonist does not feel old because he is unable to perform sexually
but because he can no longer attract a partner.
However, the protagonist’s desires are not completely physical; while
he craves sexual excitement, he also desires its opposite, stability:
16
A Gendered Approach to Ageing in Contemporary American Fiction
Contrary to what his wife told everyone, he hadn’t hungered after the
wanton freedom to do anything and everything. Far from it. He hungered
for something stable all the while he detested what he had. He was not a
man who wished to live two lives. He held no grudge against either
limitations or the comforts of conformity. (31-2)
He wants to replace one crumbling marriage with a new one that can be
started from the beginning, with the same excitement but also with the
same permanence. As he gets older, this need for stability increases; what
may be considered boring in early life (and is identified as a cause for
flight in male characters in American fiction by Leslie A. Fiedler in Love
and Death in the American Novel [1960]) is essential in later life.
Yet the protagonist has little companionship at all. The protagonist’s
funeral emphasises his isolation; his brother’s eulogy focuses upon
childhood events and his daughter, Nancy, almost entirely leaves out her
father, giving a history of the graveyard instead. This suggests there was
little of worth in his adult life, again reinforcing his nameless
unimportance; his funeral is described thus:
Up and down the state that day, there’d been five hundred funerals like his,
routine, ordinary […]. But then it’s the commonness that’s most
wrenching, the registering once more of the fact of death that overwhelms
everything. (14).
As the second part of this quotation suggests, perhaps everyone is
nameless to some extent. In another powerful graveyard scene, this time in
Sabbath’s Theater, Mickey Sabbath reads the headstones; each stone
proclaims the deceased’s belonging to another: “Our beloved mother
Minnie. Our beloved husband and father Sidney. Beloved mother and
grandmother Frieda […]” and so on for a full page. Imagining his own
headstone, he thinks, “[b]eloved Whoremonger, Seducer, Sodomist,
Abuser of Women, Destroyer of Morals, Ensnarer of Youth”31; yet he is
beloved of no-one, and has no-one left to mourn him. While the
protagonist of Everyman may have such relatives to potentially mourn
him, none seem especially affected by his death.
The protagonist is an ordinary everyman like anyone else; his life may
not be exceptional but it is still decent:
He was reasonable and kindly, an amicable, moderate, industrious man, as
everyone who knew him well would probably agree, except, of course, for
the wife and two boys whose household he’d left and who, understandably,
could not equate reasonableness and kindness with his finally giving up on
Alex Hobbs
17
a failed marriage and looking elsewhere for the intimacy with a woman he
craved. (30-1)
By making the protagonist so ordinary, I would argue that Roth elevates
this negative portrayal of an individual’s ageing into a generalised
comment on the ageing process for men as a demoralising and emasculating
descent.
In the protagonist’s fear of how he will be remembered, Roth indicates
the importance of legacy to older masculine identity. The protagonist
worries that he will only be remembered for his mistakes, that he will be
thought of as a flawed or weak man. This masculine anxiety is especially
tied to his sons; he is conscious that he should have been a better male role
model. At this late stage in his life, however, he has to accept that he has
no control over his legacy. This realisation makes him angry but he is
resigned to it: “[t]his is the man I have made. This is what I did to get here,
and there’s nothing more to be said!” (97-98). Legacy, then, is another loss
of control that Roth typifies as accompanying old age; as Janet L. Ramsey
contends:
The pathos of this book is rooted in Roth’s portrayal of narcissistic
inability to forgive. His hero cannot forgive himself, others, or providence.
He cannot forgive himself for failing at his personal relationships and for
not being the artist he might have been. He cannot forgive others for not
living up to his expectations (or, in the case of his brother Howie, for
transcending them). And he cannot forgive life itself for disappointing him
in his dreams of immortality.32
In her study of Reifungsromane, Waxman notes that older female
characters become increasingly self-aware in their latter years, and if they
die in the narrative, “it is commonly after [the character] has grown in a
significant way” (17). Although Roth’s protagonist is self-aware, this
awareness takes the form of resignation and bitterness not the positive
transcendence that Waxman identifies in female-authored fiction.
In all the aspects of the protagonist’s masculinity discussed, he
personifies Öberg’s research as he views himself as less masculine with
his increasing years: “[m]y God, he thought, the man I once was! The life
that surrounded me! The force that was mine! No ‘otherness’ to be felt
anywhere! Once upon a time I was a full human being” (130). This
proclamation distils much of what he feels throughout the novel: he
believes himself a lesser man, that he has lost—and more importantly,
cannot regain—all the facets of himself that gave him power in society.
Although the protagonist links his descent to general humanness in the last
18
A Gendered Approach to Ageing in Contemporary American Fiction
line of this quote, I believe the novel as a whole specifically ties his
experience of ageing to his masculinity.
In their introduction to Aging and Identity, Deats and Lenker state that
“the humanities have contributed to the construction of stereotypic images
of aging in our society” but that they “can [also] be employed to
deconstruct these images”.33 In Roth’s narrative, clearly the image of age
remains stereotypically bleak; indeed, his other novels with older male
protagonists similarly follow the misery perspective. Unlike Waxman’s
journeys to enlightenment in Reifungsromane, the protagonist’s positivity
is decidedly short lived. He may come to terms with the actions of his past
but he does not view his old age as a distinct period of his life, just an end
to it; there is no “opening up” to his life, only a closing down.
Nonetheless, Everyman dispels the myth that men are exempt from the
effects of ageing. Roth portrays a character that is defined by his anxiety
concerning his masculinity going into old age, which is largely the effect
of a fundamental physicalisation inherent in the social construction of
masculinity. Roth indicates the pressure of remaining vital—both in body
and utility—for as long as possible in youth-obsessed America.
Works Cited
Auster, Paul. The Brooklyn Follies. London: Faber and Faber, 2006.
Beauvior, Simone de. The Coming of Age. 1970. New York: W.W.
Norton, 1996.
Combe, Kirk and Kenneth Schmader. ‘Shakespeare Teaching Geriatrics:
Lear and Prospero as Case Studies in Aged Heterogeneity’. In Aging
and Identity: A Humanitites Perspective, eds. Sara Munson Deats and
Langretta Tallent Lenker. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. 34-46.
Cumming, Elaine and W.E. Henry. Growing Old: The Process of
Disengagement. New York: Basic Books, 1961.
Deats, Sarah Munson and Langretta Tallent Lenker. Aging and Identity: A
Humanities Persepective. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999.
Dollimore, Jonathan. Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture. New
York: Routledge, 1998.
Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. 1960. 3rd Ed.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
Friedan, Betty. The Fountain of Age. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
Gilleard, Chris and Paul Higgs. ‘Ageing and its Embodiment’. The Body:
A Reader. Eds. Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco. London: Routledge,
2005. 117-21.
Alex Hobbs
19
Gutmann, David. Reclaimed Powers: Men and Women in Later Life. 1987.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994.
Hearn, Jeff. ‘Imagining the Aging of Men’. Images of Aging: Cultural
Representations of Later Life. Eds. Mike Featherstone and Andrew
Wernick. London: Routldge, 1995. 97-118.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. 1952. London: Vintage,
1999.
Henneberg, Sylvia B. ‘Of Creative Crones and Poetry: Developing Age
Studies through Literature’. NWSA Journal 18.1 (Spring 2006): 10626.
Holmlund, Chris. Impossible Bodies: Femininity and Masculinity at the
Movies. London: Routledge, 2002.
Irving, John. The Cider House Rules. 1985. London: Black Swan, 1986.
Lawson, Mark. Mark Lawson Talks to Philip Roth. BBC4 (3 June, 2006).
Levinson, Daniel J. with Charlotte N. Darrow, Edward B. Klein, Maria H.
Levinson and Braxton McKee. The Seasons of a Man’s Life. New
York: Ballantine Books, 1978.
Lydon, Christopher. Philip Roth. Open Source with Christopher Lydon 1
Jun. 2006. http://www.radioopensource.org/philip-roth/.html
(accessed 29 May 2006).
McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. London: Picador, 2005.
McCrum, Robert. ‘The Story of My Lives’. Guardian, 21 Sep. 2008,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/21/philiproth.fiction.html
(accessed 5 October 2008).
Metcalf, Stephen. ‘Everyman’s Complaint’. Slate, 4 May 2006
http://www.slate.com/id/2141059/.html (accessed 10 May 2006).
Öberg, Peter. ‘Image versus Experience of the Aging Body’. Aging
Bodies: Images and Everyday Experience. Ed. Christopher A
Faircloth, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003. 103-39.
Ramsey, Janet L. ‘Learning from Everyman: Thoughts on Spirituality,
Love, and Death in the Lives of Older Couples’. Generations 31.1
(Fall 2007): 57-9.
Roth, Philip. Patrimony. 1991. London: Vintage, 1992.
—. Sabbath’s Theater. 1995. London: Vintage, 1996.
—. The Human Stain. 2000. London: Vintage, 2001.
—. The Dying Animal. 2001. London: Vintage, 2002.
—. Everyman. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.
—. Exit Ghost. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007.
—. Indignation. London: Jonathan Cape, 2008.
Sipiora, Phillip. ‘Hemingway’s Aging Heroes and the Concept of
Phronesis’. Aging and Identity: A Humanities Perspective. Eds. Sara
20
A Gendered Approach to Ageing in Contemporary American Fiction
Munson Deats and Langretta Tallent Lenker. Westport, CT: Praeger,
1999. 61-76.
Thompson, Edward H. ‘Guest Editorial’. The Journal of Men's Studies,
13.1 (Fall 2004)
http://www.mensstudies.com/content/j4h677680118v486/?p=17ebd27
7fe99498d9cea913431f6cbc9&pi=0.html (accessed 12 December 2007).
Waxman, Barbara Grey. From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist
Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature. New York: Greenwood
Press, 1990.
Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. ‘Introduction: Aging, Gender, and Creativity’.
Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity. Eds. Anne M.
Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rosen. Carlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1993. 1-15.
Notes
1
Levinson, The Seasons of a Man’s Life, x.
Gilleard and Higgs, ‘Ageing and its Embodiment’, 120.
3
Öberg, ‘Image versus Experience of the Aging Body’, 103.
4
Gilleard and Higgs, 59.
5
Ibid., 59.
6
Deats and Lenker, Aging and Identity, 9.
7
Wyatt-Brown, ‘Introduction: Aging, Gender, and Creativity’, 9.
8
Waxman, From the Hearth to the Open Road, 2. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
9
Henneberg, ‘Of Creative Crones and Poetry’. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
10
Combe and Schmader, ‘Shakespeare Teaching Geriatrics’, 35.
11
Ibid., 38.
12
Ibid., 34.
13
Wyatt-Brown, 1.
14
Holmlund, Impossible Bodies, 144.
15
Thompson, ‘Guest Editorial’, par. 1.
16
Öberg, 103.
17
Gutmann, Reclaimed Powers, 6.
18
Öberg, 42.
19
McCrum, ‘The Story of My Lives’, par. 11.
20
Lawson, Mark Lawson Talks to Philip Roth.
21
Roth, Everyman, 70. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
22
Friedan, The Fountain of Age, 56.
23
Hearn, ‘Imagining the Aging of Men’, 100.
24
Lydon, Philip Roth.
25
Levinson, 36.
26
Ibid., 26-7.
27
Metcalf, ‘Everyman’s Complaint’, par. 7.
2
Alex Hobbs
21
28
Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture, xii.
Ibid., xiii.
30
Öberg, 120.
31
Roth, Sabbath’s Theater, 364, 376.
32
Ramsey, ‘Learning from Everyman’, 57.
33
Deats and Lenker, 1.
29
CHASING AFTER THE WIND:
THE ADOLESCENT APORIAS
OF JEFFREY EUGENIDES
RACHAEL MCLENNAN
Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides (1993) describes the suicides
of five adolescent sisters in suburban 1970s Detroit. In an excellent
analysis, Kenneth Millard claims that “it is important to recognise the
novel as both a search for a point of origin and a historical explanation.”1
Its retrospective narrative is told by a “choral narrator”2 who recounts
experiences of an unspecified group of males profoundly affected by the
suicides, and who ostensibly seek origin and explanation for the deaths
and their own responses. Millard argues that the novel participates in a
wider trend in American fiction about coming-of-age:
The contemporary American coming-of-age novel is often aetiological in
its search for origins: it goes back in a process of historical enquiry that
recedes beyond the horizon of its protagonist’s knowing. This process is
particularly valuable because it defines an epistemology while
simultaneously scrutinising the efficacy of that epistemology. This is a
process that creates a document of historical analysis, the novel, which
then stands as an historical record in its own right, a finished or
accomplished aesthetic record of a search for a legitimate historical
beginning. This search for a satisfying origin begins again and again in the
contemporary American coming-of-age novel; almost every search ends in
the full knowledge of the inadequacy of searches, every methodology
results principally in an understanding of the limits of methodologies.3
Millard’s argument is compelling but problematic, engaging in complex
elisions and questionable distinctions between different searches for
origin. Arguing that protagonists within coming-of-age novels undertake a
search for origins, he also claims that the coming-of-age novel performs a
search for origins. The novel (anxiously categorised as “historical
analysis”, “historical record”, “aesthetic record”) is more “knowing” than
its protagonist. Its “historical enquiry” measures the success of the means